Jessica Luther
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jessicawluther.com
Jessica Luther
@jessicawluther.com
15K followers 1.5K following 3.6K posts
Investigative journalist, mainly sports. Wrote a couple books. PhD in Sports Studies. Dissertation on U Texas women's bball team in the 1970s. Co-host @burnitalldownpod.com. Tall. Tired. She/Her. Austin, TX https://www.jessicawluther.com/
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jessicawluther.com
When we were deciding on the rewards for @burnitalldownpod.com's Kickstarter, I said that I would happily read 4,000 people's names if 4,000 people wanted to give us $100 each. We aren't close to 4,000 but it's still looking nice. www.kickstarter.com/projects/bur...
A screenshot that reads "Light a Torch $100. Backers 69. Estimated delivery Jun 2026."
February 4, 2026 at 2:00 PM
jessicawluther.com
*zooooooooming in*
A protest sign reading "Trump can oligargle deez nutz"
January 23, 2026 at 8:47 PM
jessicawluther.com
Look at this picture! This is from USC's visit to UT at the beginning of the 1985-1986 season. UT won, 94-78. They'd beat USC one more time that season, in the final.
"USC superstar Cheryl Miller soars over the pack, including UT's Kamie Ethridge." Miller is going up for a layup with her right hand. You can see every muscle in her arms. She looks like she's two feet off the ground. The players and the ref around her can only just watch.
January 16, 2026 at 11:12 PM
jessicawluther.com
trying to see what the final photograph ended up looking like:
Bursting magazine's bubble, Lady Longhorn center rejects Sports Illustrated's offer to pose in tub
January 16, 2026 at 9:59 PM
jessicawluther.com
In early 1985, the UT women's basketball team moved into the #1 ranked spot. The local paper in Austin asked locals for their reactions and most of them were people who follow women's basketball who were excited about the new ranking. And then there's Frank:
FRANK FRERICKS, 27, marketing rep: "I don't follow women's athletics; I follow men's athletics somewhat. But it's great because it matters to them."
January 16, 2026 at 5:39 PM
jessicawluther.com
What a world we’ve built. Getting emails like this… I don’t have words.
Dear Austin ISD Families and Staff, This week, the FBI notified the Austin ISD Police Department of a threat to 14 Texas schools, including three schools that shared names with Austin ISD schools. We immediately began working with our campus leadership to ensure the safety of our students and staff and we are staying in constant contact with the FBI. Today we received information that the threat appears to originate from outside the country. Still, out of an abundance of caution, Austin ISD Police will provide close support to Andrews, Baranoff and Barrington elementary schools. This was a stressful event for many of our families and we understand the need for additional districtwide communications in instances that receive this level of media attention.
January 9, 2026 at 12:36 AM
jessicawluther.com
There are workers in what appears to be missile control (there are radar screens and the words ALERT and LAUNCH). The caption reads, “Hey, What’s that clown think he’s doing?” One of the workers is pointing at a circus clown who is about to push a launch button.
December 12, 2025 at 3:31 PM
jessicawluther.com
I sent this text like 10 minutes ago
Text exchange. Me in blue: “NOT T.A.T.U.” Friend in gray: “I KNOW.” Me in blue: “OMG THE WAY THE SONG SHIFTS JFC this show is so well done.”
December 12, 2025 at 3:21 PM
jessicawluther.com
An email just now from the Austin American-Statesman, my local paper. I hate when headlines or email subject lines or whatever from news outlets should be sentences and not questions, but instead they chicken out.
Is the push to expand Turning Point USA to all campuses a political move?
December 10, 2025 at 5:05 PM
jessicawluther.com
Screenshot showing book is price at $3.99 on Kindle
August 30, 2025 at 6:39 PM
jessicawluther.com
In addition to this thread of our work, here is the best award @dansolomon.com and I have ever received (scatx is my old, old, old Twitter handle)
Screenshot of a tweet from Oakman_Rules, written on August 23, 2015 at 9:50pm. The tweet reads: "The shitty journalism award for 2015 goes to Texas Monthly dan solomon and scatx" (the latter referring to Jessica's old Twitter handle)
August 23, 2025 at 7:57 PM
jessicawluther.com
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) sent out an email re: the message that appeared on the National Archives’ site yesterday about access to the NA’s collections:
Yesterday, Tuesday, June 24, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, announced its closure to the public, starting July 7, except for those with “legitimate business interests.” The head of Research Services responded to an email query about continued access to the College Park facility saying: “Onsite research is a legitimate business need to access the facility. There is additional information on the Visitor Requirements section of the National Archives at College Park webpage." As of 9pm last night, NARA switched the page back to what it was prior to the announcement. The banner and all the changes to the wording online had been removed. OAH will continue to monitor the situation and share what we learn. We encourage you to contact your Congressional representatives to voice your support for NARA and continued access to NARA research facilities.
June 25, 2025 at 5:36 PM
jessicawluther.com
This is as close as the article gets. Sure.
A second Latino man from Las Vegas spoke admiringly of Trump and Andrew Tate, a controversial influencer who has been accused of rape and sex trafficking, as “always loved and hated, but they’re truthful, honest, to what they believe in.”
June 5, 2025 at 4:23 AM
jessicawluther.com
Tomorrow's the day!!!! Hook 'em!
Jessica in her burnt orange PhD regalia, holding a basketball with the word TEXAS on it and giving the hook em sign with her other hand.
May 10, 2025 at 2:11 AM
jessicawluther.com
LET’S GO
Jessica from behind, standing with her arms up, biceps flexed, wearing an Austin FC Armadillo Kit jersey that says “Dr Luther” across the back and the number 25
April 4, 2025 at 7:41 PM
jessicawluther.com
For anyone who asked, here's the abstract for my dissertation, “Desexigration and Desegregation: Gender, Race, and Women’s Basketball at the University of Texas in the 1970s”
“Desexigration and Desegregation: Gender, Race, and Women’s Basketball at the University of Texas in the 1970s” examines the ways in which the University of Texas addressed gender and racial discrimination following the passage of major civil rights legislation and during the early years of the women’s intercollegiate athletics department through the lens of its most high-profile team, the women’s basketball team. Desegregation efforts demanded that marginalized people assimilate into the white populace while desexigration efforts required separation and isolation for female athletes from the larger men’s athletics infrastructure. In athletics specifically, the intense fight to carve out and maintain any space for women caused many administrators and coaches, who were often white, to focus solely on gender discrimination with little concern for the impact of race. For example, Rodney Page, a Black man hired to coach the UT women’s basketball team from 1973 to 1976, was the first Black head coach at Texas and another would not be hired until 1992. He is still one of only seven head coaches in the school’s history and until very recently, he was largely forgotten by women’s athletics. Caught in the middle of these policies were Black female athletes like Retha Swindell, the first Black female varsity athlete at UT, who were navigating multiple institutional structures that were hostile to their presence. By evaluating desexigration alongside desegregation instead of as two separate phenomena, this dissertation argues that attempts to end gender and racial discrimination in athletics were not linear and were often uneven. Many white women, like Donna Lopiano, the first women’s athletic director at Texas, and Jody Conradt, the legendary basketball coach who was hired in 1976, found new, if not challenging, avenues open to them while many people of color, especially Black women, were overlooked or ignored in yet another arena of their lives. By studying desexigration and desegregation’s effects on a single team and in a single women’s athletics department, it becomes clear how these two forces corrected some historical discriminatory trends and perpetuated others. Through the extensive use of primary sources and interviews with people involved in women’s basketball and women’s athletics in the 1970s at Texas, “Desexigration and Desegregation” captures how people in women’s athletics like Lopiano, Conradt, Page, Swindell, and many others built one of the most successful women’s athletic departments in the country despite the constraints under which they operated, and how their decisions, both good and bad, set women’s athletics on a path it is still on, many decades later.
March 18, 2025 at 4:23 PM
jessicawluther.com
He looks like an old, grumpy man surveying his front yard
Ralph, a black labradoodle, lying on his bed, one arm over the side and his paw hooked under on the ground. He is looking out the window.
March 13, 2025 at 8:17 PM
jessicawluther.com
I truly never know what I'm going to come across when looking at old articles about women's basketball (San Francisco Examiner, Feb 10, 1976)
Screenshot of newspaper article title, "Women's basketball isn't a sissy game" by Andy Meisler
March 6, 2025 at 6:34 PM
jessicawluther.com
This is where "desexigration" comes from, in case you were like, "why did you make up that word, Jessica?"
It’s no wonder that Spurr was worrying over possible legal consequences if the university moved too slowly. In December 1973, Harry Reger, along with an attorney who also had a daughter interested in playing tennis at UT, met with Mary Teague, the Equal Employment Opportunity Officer, in Austin. “The purpose of their visit was to determine the status of women’s athletics and financial support thereof at UT-Autin,” Teague wrote to Lorene Rogers. “They feel it is extremely important that UT-Austin, as the most prestigious and powerful university in the state, take the lead in desexigrating (a word I borrowed from HEW officials) athletic programs.” After Teague informed them that the Council was working on the problem, “they indicated that they would pursue this matter, via litigation, if necessary.”
March 6, 2025 at 3:51 AM
jessicawluther.com
This is the Table of Contents for what I've been working on for literal years!
Introduction Chapter 1: Women’s Basketball in Texas and at UT Before 1968 Chapter 2: Women Demand Varsity Athletics at the UT, 1968–1973 Chapter 3: Separate and Unequal: The Desexigration of Intercollegiate Athletics at UT, 1973–1974 Chapter 4: Together but Unequal: Desegregation at UT Chapter 5: The First Year of Women’s Basketball at UT, 1974 Chapter 6: Donna Lopiano and the Defense of Title IX, 1975 Chapter 7: Retha Swindell Enters and Rodney Page Exits, 1976 Chapter 8: The End of the Beginning for Women’s Sports at UT, 1976–1979 Epilogue
March 6, 2025 at 3:34 AM
jessicawluther.com
The men's basketball coach at Queen's College in a NYT op-ed directed at other male collegiate coaches telling them to chill out about Title IX, August 10, 1975 (a couple weeks after the first official Title IX guidelines were released):
The coach who maintains the traditional attitude of "natural" male superiority will feel constantly threatened, frustrate and harassed. He will envision his public image tarnished, his goals thwarted by new economic concerns, and a seemingly ungrateful and insatiable group of women pretenders continually seeking to further erode his traditional prerogatives. What's worse, suppose the women should actually be "more successful" than he himself?
February 20, 2025 at 6:10 PM
jessicawluther.com
This worked for me, FYI (in case you are anti-red bubble like I am and also refuse to use facial recognition and the set up bubble is bothering you) www.idownloadblog.com/2018/02/05/h...
Remove the ‘Finish Setting Up Your iPhone or iPad’ alert 1) Open the Settings app on your iOS device. 2) Tap a message asking that you finish setting up your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, displayed at the top of the Settings app right below your Apple ID profile picture. 3) You will be taken to a new screen with options for managing any features that you have not originally enabled during the initial iOS setup, like setting up Apple Pay on this device, signing into your Apple ID, enabling Siri, turning on iMessage, and so forth. Tap the option to Set Up Apple Pay, Set Up Siri, Set Up iMessage, or such to continue. If you’ve skimped on more than one feature during the iOS setup process, this option should be labeled Finish Setting Up. 4) On the next screen, choose the option to set up the feature at a later stage. Basically, the trick is to choose to set up a feature and then cancel the process. If necessary, do this for a second time for the annoying message to clear.
February 17, 2025 at 6:27 PM
jessicawluther.com
I know the saying is that history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. But sometimes it does just repeat. From July 13, 1972:
Screenshot of newspaper article: By Jeffrey St. John Copley News Service New York - "The American people are slow to wrath," observed Teddy Roosevelt some 71 years ago, "but when their wrath is once kindled, it burns like a consuming fire." The federal, state and city governments of this country are stoking the fires of racial conflict by an immoral policy of requiring "discrimination in reverse" in hiring unqualified blacks and minorities at the expense of qualified whites. Just as the issue of busing smoldered below the surface like molten lava from a volcano for some time, so the angry wrath of Americans is likely to explode in the face of politicians favoring quotas of employment for blacks and minorities. Early in June, Carl Shiffman, a senior investigator for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resigned his job in anger, charging the agency discriminated against him both as a white and a Jew. Shiffman specifically charges that the commission "discriminates in favor of Negroes and Spanish-surnamed Americans in hiring, promotion, and terms of employment in violation of the laws (the commission) was set up to enforce." Nor is this an isolated case. A systematic pattern of discrimination in favor of hiring blacks and minorities is actively being pushed in government agencies and intense pressure is being mounted by the federal government for private business to hire by racial quota.
February 4, 2025 at 5:12 PM
jessicawluther.com
"Woman, 102, Hates Water" (April 21, 1971)
Screenshot of a newspaper article titled "Woman, 102, Hates Water" PARIS - Madame Eva Kanony boarded a recent Air France flight from Paris to Toulouse to visit relatives. Except for the fact everyone made a fuss about her age – she's 102 years old – the flight was uneventful one for the grand dame, who still enjoys a glass of wine with every meal and detest soup because it contains water.
February 4, 2025 at 4:53 PM
jessicawluther.com
"If you are a cisgender ally to the transgender community, I want you to think long and hard about how you can make a difference in these trying times." -- @assignedmedia.org's newsletter today, written by @alyssaur.bsky.social. Support their work here: www.assignedmedia.org/newsletter
If you are a cisgender ally to the transgender community, I want you to think long and hard about how you can make a difference in these trying times. Can you send a trans person money to ensure that they don’t end up on the streets? Can you donate to bail funds that keep marginalized people out of prison? Can you yourself demonstrate in the streets so that somebody who is more at risk can stay home? These are dark and scary times, but we all have our parts to play moving forward. Don’t think for a single second that you can’t help because you aren’t anybody’s idea of a hero. Anybody can be a hero. They just have to decide to be one.
January 30, 2025 at 2:44 PM